Freiheit und Moral
Welche Moral vertreten islamische Extremisten? Gar keine, sagt zu Recht Jonathan Carson im “American Thinker” (via “American Future“):
An Islamofascist walks the streets of America and sees a man enter a massage parlor. “What an immoral society!” he thinks. He does not notice the men who do not go in. He sees the temptations Americans are subject to, but not their resistance to those temptations. He sees their immorality, but not their morality.
Americans are free to be either moral or immoral. How immoral would our enemies be if they were free?
Moral als charakterliche Haltung setzt die Freiheit voraus, sich für oder gegen sie zu entscheiden:
America is free to be immoral, but when America is moral, its morality is genuine—because it is free to be immoral. No one praises prison inmates for not breaking into houses—or Saudi women for not having automobile accidents.
Und auch im Westen ist dieses Missverständnis vorhanden:
Unfortunately, many in the West also see only the sins of America. They also confuse license and freedom, repression and self-control, taxation and charity. (…)
They confuse poverty imposed by an economic system and voluntary poverty, destitution and poverty of spirit, backwardness and protection of the environment. They think that Americans are more materialist than people with fewer material goods—as if people in other countries don’t desire the same things. They think that socialism is compatible with Christianity and capitalism is not, forgetting that socialism is as much a system for producing material goods as capitalism is, just a less efficient one. They think that there is something inherently wrong with wanting a car that does not break down or a computer that does not crash, but cars, computers, and other consumer goods are not evil. Making idols of them is evil; putting them to good use is not. They think that because Native Americans were technologically backward, they must have been environmentalists. Again and again, they confuse morality with constraint: the constraint of poverty, the constraint of inefficiency, the constraint of backwardness, ultimately the constraint of tyranny.
“Gegen diesen Wahnsinn an Agitation gibt es nur eine Waffe: die Vernunft” schrieb Ludwig von Mises bereits 1944 über die Sozialromantiker und -revolutionäre seiner Zeit, die Fortschritt mit Bürokratie und Freiheit mit Obrigkeit zu verwechseln pflegten.
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Zwei m.E. gute Beispiele wie die Amerikaner fuer Moral und Freiheit eintreten, auch wenn es ihrer Sicherheit schadet aus der heutigen Presse:
Der Richter, der die noch nicht veroeffentlichten Abu Ghreib Fotos freigab, begründete seine Entscheidung so:
U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein said that terrorists “do not need pretexts for their barbarism” and that suppressing the pictures would amount to submitting to blackmail. “Our nation does not surrender to blackmail, and fear of blackmail is not a legally sufficient argument to prevent us from performing a statutory command. Indeed, the freedoms that we champion are as important to our success in Iraq and Afghanistan as the guns and missiles with which our troops are armed.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/.....01890.html
Und Capt. Ian Fishback begruendete seine Aufdeckung von weiteren Misshandlungen so:
“If we abandon our ideals in the face of adversity and aggression, then those ideals were never really in our possession. I would rather die fighting than give up even the smallest part of the idea that is ‘America.’”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/.....01527.html
Das sind Opfer fuer Freiheit und Moral. Sehr beeindruckend wie sie unmoralischen und barbarischen Feinden gegenübertreten.
Zwei m.E. gute Beispiele wie die Amerikaner fuer Moral und Freiheit eintreten, auch wenn es ihrer Sicherheit schadet aus der heutigen Presse:
Der Richter, der die noch nicht veroeffentlichten Abu Ghreib Fotos freigab, begründete seine Entscheidung so:
U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein said that terrorists “do not need pretexts for their barbarism” and that suppressing the pictures would amount to submitting to blackmail. “Our nation does not surrender to blackmail, and fear of blackmail is not a legally sufficient argument to prevent us from performing a statutory command. Indeed, the freedoms that we champion are as important to our success in Iraq and Afghanistan as the guns and missiles with which our troops are armed.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/.....01890.html
Und Capt. Ian Fishback begruendete seine Aufdeckung von weiteren Misshandlungen so:
“If we abandon our ideals in the face of adversity and aggression, then those ideals were never really in our possession. I would rather die fighting than give up even the smallest part of the idea that is ‘America.’”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/.....01527.html
Das sind Opfer fuer Freiheit und Moral. Sehr beeindruckend wie sie unmoralischen und barbarischen Feinden gegenübertreten.